TreoCentral Review: Agendus Mail v5 for PalmOS

[via TreoCentral.com]

Agendus Mail for the Masses

Electronic Mail or e-mail is far from a recent innovation. Sure, it’s much younger than physical mail ("snail") by post, which has existed in some form or another for almost 3000 years, and perhaps longer. The ancient Persians and Chinese had working postal systems around 1100 BC, and by contrast, it was potentially just as efficient as our own postal system today considering their couriers rode across vast expanses of land on horseback, much like the American Pony Express did for a few years in the mid-19th Century.

That said, though, the electronic concept of messaging is still a fledgling child in comparison, but it has advanced far more in just the last forty years than any other means of communication, possibly barring the telephone.

E-mail has its roots in the MIT Compatible Time Sharing System, which in 1961 allowed users to store files on an IBM 7094 mainframe and retrieve them from remote (dial-up slave) terminals. This allowed a simple way to manipulate data at a distance, as well as deliver communiqués with relative ease.

Progress continued on efficient means of delivering messages over intranet based systems, but the most recognizable form of e-mail finally materialized in 1971 when Ray Tomlinson designated a method for which a user name and their machine ID were separated with an ‘@’ sign on the Dept. of Defense's ARPANET system. That’s still decades before the launch of the World Wide Web, A.K.A. the modern Internet.

Today, e-mail is ubiquitous - as common as flowers in spring, though the bulk (pun intended) of messages delivered daily are junk mail, generally referred to as spam.

E-mail messages are relayed from the user writing them to a mail server, usually on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and then on through the multiple backbone servers of the Internet until they reach their destination Post Office Protocol v3 (POP3) machine. From there, the recipient downloads the messages and reads them in a mail program a.k.a. a mail "client."

Of course, in this day of non-uniform technology where standards become as obscured as the truth in George Orwell's “1984”, many other methods and protocols now abound. The most common alternative is the Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP), which keeps messages stored on the servers instead of downloading them to your device when you go to read them. Naturally, other methods creep in the cracks, and the most infamous is the Microsoft Exchange Server, which is difficult to access from anything short of a desktop Windows PC.

Treo to the Rescue

It isn’t hard to imagine why, in a world of fast-paced business meetings and Starbucks Coffee shops that e-mail has become the staple food of the professional world. Previously, because the Internet requires some sort of live telephonic connection to operate, a typical person would have to stop at the office or at home periodically to check their message and make sure that they were always up to date on the latest to-dos and why-fors. Cellular modems eased the problem for a while, but at a price. Using them pulls at your pockets heavily in terms of cellular access charges. Even today, if you want to use a cell-modem card in your laptop to access the ‘net on the go, you’ll have to pay by the minute for the privilege.

Luckily, Treo owners have another means of accessing their mail, as your Treo’s built-in wireless Internet connection makes the task a no-brainer. In all actuality, the hardest part of using your Treo for e-mail is picking the right application for the job.

Palm includes VersaMail (formerly MultiMail) on all of the newest Treo models, but in contrast to other applications available for your pocket-Internet appliance, it frankly lacks a lot of glam.. my experiences with VersaMail have been less than pleasant, but happily, there are far more capable and versatile programs out there to use instead.

That’s another market niche where the smart folks at iambic step in to offer their aid. Agendus Mail, the messaging counterpart to their solid and widely popular Agendus offers support for multiple access protocols, and in the case of the Treo 700p, it may even allow you to grab mail from some of those pesky Exchange Servers out there.

Agendus Mail v5

("AGM") comes in two distinct versions: Standard, and SSL Edition.

The only difference between the two is that the SSL Edition allows you to use Secure Socket Layer encryption, which means (as long as the servers you use are properly configured and enabled) that your messages remain secure from prying eyes and nosey co-workers.

Both versions are available as stand-alone apps, but Agendus Mail SSL Edition is also included with the Agendus Premier package.

Which one you choose depends entirely on whether or not you plan to use encrypted messaging, and whether or not you can with your e-mail service. It’s always best to check first to see if your provider supports SSL and if your recipients can utilize it before bothering with the extra step. If you constantly send messages with confidential “eyes-only” content, it’s worth the extra $5 for that ability. It may be worth it even if you think you may ever have the need to send your messages securely.

Like all of iambic’s products, you can try before you buy AGM. Simply download the app and install it; it'll run for 3 days uninhibited. After that, you can either bite the bullet and buy the program unlocking key, or if you’re still pondering you may request a 14-day demo code, with which AGM runs unencumbered for another two weeks. After that, however, you’ll need to fully unlock the program by shelling out the dough for it, lest it lock you out instead. The process is blissfully simple, as you can either buy the unlock code over the Internet, or over the air right from your Treo, within Agendus Mail. Now that’s simplicity you can bank on.

Space Enough At Last

In a perfect world, everything would always come in the right proportions and the well would never run dry. Every meal would satiate, every check would be on time, and the IRS wouldn’t need your money. The real world, however, is full of limitations and your Treo is just another good example of this.

Palm, in their infinite wisdom decreed that no Treo owner would ever need more than about 60MB of internal free space, roughly what a personal computer hard disc was in 1988, and left software companies holding the proverbial bag with dealing with the finite amount of data a Treo can hold. Smart developers create applications that make smart use of the Treo’s SD/MMC card slot, and AGM is no exception.

In contrast to VersaMail, which stores all messages and their attachments in internal memory, AGM allows you to select where you prefer to store your messages and their corresponding attachments. The setting for each is totally independent of the other, meaning you can choose to store attachments on a card and message bodies internally, or vice-versa, or store them both on a card, which is likely the ideal setting. Not only does storing both messages and attachments on an external medium mean that none of your internal RAM is wasted with whopping PDF files or large graphics, but it also means that backing up your messages is a snap and only requires seconds of your time to copy them from your memory card to your PC.

If for no other reason than this, AGM is an ideal candidate for e-mail handling on your Treo, and likewise, VersaMail is not.

Two-Face vs. the World

For some people, having one e-mail account is enough and you’ll never need for more. In the world of big, or even little business, having multiple e-mail accounts is not only necessary, but ideal and commonplace as well. This is especially true for business owners who also work a second job, or execs that require having a one mailbox for business mail and another for their personal stuff. I have half a dozen e-mail accounts myself. In AGM, you may even switch the account you are presently using while composing a new message.

AGM handles this by allowing multiple accounts, created in just a few seconds, and accessible from a simple pull-down menu. There is no limit to the number of separate e-mail accounts (Personalities or Identities) that AGM allows you to add, though the list of mailboxes may get aggravatingly long. For each separate account you configure in AGM, you'll automatically have an Inbox, Outbox, Deleted, Drafts and Sent folders. Additional folders to ease the sorting of your messages are easy to create, and you can have as many as you need to get the job done.

AGM also comes pre-built with a Hotsync account, with which you can transfer mail from your desktop PC through the Hotsync conduit to your Treo in either direction, meaning you can use your Treo to compose mail and then send it from your PC, or you can read your desktop PC’s mail on your Treo. This feature does however, only work with Windows Outlook, so if you’re a Mac or Linux user, you’re on your own.

More than One Way

Even though most e-mail sent today is still just plain text, many people have switched to using HTML encoded messages to make their mail prettier. HTML based e-mail is common enough now to be largely un-noticed from a PC, as the main differences are the extra formatting and images found within the body of the message, but on a Treo HTML messages are a burden at best, and a nightmare at worst. A plain text email, just a few sentences might take up 1kb of space but if sent as HTML, it could easily be ten times that size!

Most HTML mail is completely un-viewable on a Treo. If you’ve ever received a message in VersaMail that is largely composed of garbage text with no discernable content, then you have seen what a nightmare these kinds of messages are and that they are usually unreadable, never mind the fact that most spammers love to send e-mails that are nothing BUT a graphic with a phony subject line and a forged / fake address making them difficult if not impossible to block or filter.

AGM solves this by linking to your default web browser, and upon your command, relaying the HTML mail TO the browser so that you may open and view it in all its glory, or ugliness, depending on how you look at it. With one tap of a button, Blazer opens and all of that garbled junk finally becomes clear and readable. No longer need you rush back to your office or lug around your laptop to read all of your messages.

Beyond that, AGM also has two distinct viewing modes: Compact and Expanded. Compact mode displays your messages with the sender’s name, a small snippet of the subject, which on a Treo are typically one to two letters and message date stamp. Unfortunately, this limitation makes using this mode on your Treo practically pointless, unless you only need to know who sent you a message and not what it concerns. That you cannot resize the Sender, Subject and Data partitions is rather disappointing, as it would be much more flexible if you could just drag them to make the viewable area larger like you can on most computers.

Therefore, the Expanded mode is more personable, as it displays the name of the sender, the date, the subject and a few lines of the body of each message. Whichever way you opt to go, you can scroll through your messages using the arrows and elevator, or with your handy 5-way nav pad, which is fully supported throughout AGM5.

AGM also handles SMS messaging, which can be either a boon or a bane, depending on what Treo model you have.

The major drawback with the way AGM handles your SMS messages is that it doesn't use the super-cool threaded mode that the built-in SMS messaging client on the 700p does, but rather each message is stored like an e-mail as an entity of its own. There is also no way to create additional folders for SMS messages, so the clutter builds in your SMS inbox rather quickly, depending on how much you use this feature.

The inability to create mailboxes is not, however, the fault of the developers, but rather a limitation of the Treo itself, and the way Palm (previously Handspring) engineered them. Because the Treo does not support SMS folders, neither does Agendus Mail.

On the bright side, if you use a 650, the AGM way of handling SMS conversations may be quite useful, if for no other reason than the exceptionally handy and time-saving QuickText (boilerplate) feature. This clever option allows you to quickly send a simple string of text from a list of choices, which you are free to add to or modify. Send your buddy a quick note like “Let’s meet at O’Malley’s” and save it to your boilerplate list, or select “I’m running late” to quickly reply to the office folks when they are nagging you for your 10-20 (HAM radio jargon for your location)..

QuickText even works in e-mails, which means you can compose a list of simple messages that you can send to your co-workers, friends, or the guy from Mars next-door, all with the tap of a button.

In either case, you can easily enable or disable the AGM SMS account, though turning it off does also mean losing any SMS messages you currently have in your AGM SMS inbox, as you will need to delete your entire AGM SMS account to do so. Because you can’t store SMS messages on a card, it’s impractical to back them up and this way of turning off SMS handling is a real drag.

One for All, all for You

If you are already an Agendus user, you’ll be happy to know that AGM links directly with Agendus and can be quickly set as the default mail client for the messages button in the Agendus toolbar. AGM shares the Agendus toolbar as well, so you can switch between the two applications as smoothly as if AGM was just another Agendus "View."

This simple feature completely streamlines your work environment, as there is no need to constantly flip between half a dozen applications to perform one task. Everything you need is right at your finger (or stylus) tips, including all of your contacts, as AGM is optimized to make adding an existing contact to an e-mail or SMS as slick as can be. Just start typing the contact’s name in the appropriate field, and AGM finds the nearest match for that entity, or tap a button and select from a list of all available contacts. AGM even remembers the most recently used contacts and keeps them stored in a sweet pull-down menu.

Integration doesn’t end there. As long as you have both programs installed, you can create new meetings, tasks, calls, memos, contacts, etc. from within AGM, plus you can create new e-mails or SMS messages from within Agendus. Slick!

Mail Handling and Courier Services

There are several ways to handle mail delivery and receipt in AGM. The primary two are of course over a Hotsync connection, or over your wireless Internet connection. With the latter, there is also an array of options from which to choose. The biggest choice lies in whether you want to send messages immediately when you tap the send button, or queue them up until you instruct AGM to send them all as a batch.

The second of these choices is ideal if you want to compose messages while on the phone, and then send them off when your call ends. On a PalmOS Treo, as you probably know, there's no way on this green Earth to send a data transmission at the same time as you are using the phone, so if you feel the need to write a bunch of memos while talking to your office-mates, the queue options is the way to go.

You may also send or receive messages for only one of your e-mail accounts or for all of them at once. Both of these choices lie in the AGM menus, but you can set which method you prefer in its preferences as the default mode, which will be linked to the time-saving Send/Receive button in the toolbar. In addition, like Agendus, all of the little glyphs in the toolbar are tooltip enabled, meaning that if you tap-and-hold any of them, a contextual popup balloon appears to remind you of the function of said button. Tap-and-hold most any other object on-screen (e.g. an e-mail in your inbox) and AGM displays a pop-up contextual menu with options pertaining to that type of object. In the case of an e-mail, choices include sending, forwarding, replying and the like.

One feature I'd love to see..

As you can see, AGM is a wildly flexible, and feature-packed program. I've used SnapperFish's SnapperMail for a few years and while its feature set is quite similar to AGM, it has one very cool GUI feature that I really missed having in AGM.. in fact I wish ALL PalmOS programs that use a skinny scroll bar on the right edge of the screen had it – for scrolling through long mails, SnapperMail has both a stylus mode and a finger mode .. in finger mode, you can keep your stylus parked and simply touch your fingertip near the vertical scroll bar which instantly expands into a "fat" bar, eliminating the need to turn your finger sideways and use your fingernail to move the scroll bar's slider up and down. I don't remember seeing this wonderful feature in any other PalmOS program I've ever used.

Then again, SnapperMail doesn't have the tight integration with Agendus that AGM has, but I thought that was worth mentioning and I'd urge PalmOS developers to take a look at that finger mode and implement it in their programs.

Conclusion

Agendus Mail is one of the most flexible and innovative e-mail clients for PalmOS. It’s a breeze to set up and use multiple accounts without getting confused or bewildered by all the messages in your inbox, and it’s a snap to send and receive mail from a wide variety of servers. There are only a few limitations of the interface, mostly due to the size of the Treo’s screen, but they are a cinch to overcome with all the different viewing options iambic has crammed into it. Overall, Agendus Mail packs a ton of features in a small application with an even smaller price tag.